[WikiEN-l] Systematic violation of the GFDL

Sun Sep 11 21:40:34 UTC 2005

It has recently come to my attention that the
one-woman small-scale commercial website
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ has been copying
paragraphs and entire passages from Wikipedia articles
and dropping them into their own content, without
attribution or GFDL release.

The initial discussion of this exists at Katefan0's
RFA, after she was accused of copying this site's
content when in fact it is now clear they have been
copying from us:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Katefan0

I have spent a bit of time looking into this and found
at least 5 cases of misappropriation in the 7
historical articles I looked at from that site.  In
some cases, there are minor changes to our text (e.g.
NPOV -> "It's a great place to visit"), and in all
cases the paragraphs that have been copied are
surrounded by text and images that do not appear to
have come from us.  What makes this worse however, is
that in at least one case other passages in the same
article were copied from yet another copyrighted
online source without attribution.

This last feature suggests that even if this person
were open to sticking a GFDL label on all her
derivative works, that they would still be copyvios
related to misappropriations from other sites.

Since this is a very small business, I believe it is
at least concievable that the person in charge does
not understand copyright law (mix and match from
enough copyrighted sources and it becomes fair use,
right?), though I am inclined to doubt that the
average person would think it is okay to copy material
without any attribution whatever.

The site boasts having more than 2000 pages of
content.  Some of that is user submitted and fluff
pieces, like ghost stories, that seem unlikely to have
come from us.  But a large chunk is factual and
historical content about the American Southwest.  If
my informal survey is representative, we could be
talking about dozens or even hundreds of pages with
content copied from us.

Do people have any suggestions for how to pursue this?

-DF